Includes bibliographical references (pages 289-301), filmography (pages 285-288) and index.
Contents:
Introduction: Tales of the time: an overview of DEFA fairy-tale films -- Inheriting the humanist tradition: subversion of magic in early fairy tale models -- Entangled in the Cold War: tales of struggle and political allegories -- Love is real wealth: money, work, and the Cold War -- Ambiguity between Conformism and Resistance: slave-language and political satires -- A sigh of the times: tales of civil rights, peace, and ecology -- Conclusion: (Socialits) countertales: disenchantment and (Re)enchantment in DEFA fairy tales.
Summary:
From Paul Verhoeven's The Cold Heart in 1950 to Konrad Petzold's The Story of the Goose Princess and Her Loyal Horse Falada in 1989, East Germany's state-sponsored film company, DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft), produced over forty feature-length, live-action fairy-tale films based on nineteenth-century folk and literary tales. While many of these films were popular successes and paved the way for the studio's other films to enter the global market, DEFA's fairy-tale corpus has not been studied in its entirety. In The Politics of Magic: DEFA Fairy-Tale Films, Qinna Shen fills this gap by analyzing the films on thematic and formal levels and examining their embedded agendas in relation to the cultural politics of the German Democratic Republic.--Provided by publisher
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.